05/06/13 23:51:00

Part of my expansion plan for the Georgia Space Society is a bit of advertising around the state to raise awareness. My first experiment is a Facebook ad targeting various keywords and users in the state. Starting tomorrow anyone expressing an interest in “NASA” should see the ad until the $10/day runs out. After tomorrow I'll try a new set of keywords.

After that I'll be trying the “if you are one, find one” technique where I specifically target existing members in an area to recruit new members.

Can anyone think of other ways of reaching potential NSS members around the state?

This thread is a good example of the futility of engaging them. Their view is a government centered one that, at my most gracious, smacks of European socialism. A centrally planned approach that doesn't work here.

Our country has historically been a capitalist system. Our private enterprise system has produced some of the greatest developments of the past few hundreds years. I'm the kind of American that embraces that history of capitalism and fights against socialist tendencies at every opportunity. And americaspace.com is an example of that centrally planned socialist tendency.

In a world such as ours, space is a resource we desperately need to develop economically. Our future survival depends on it. That's why I haven't engaged them and have discouraged others from doing so. Their view of how our space industry should be organized is fundamentally un-American. And that's dangerous.

05/01/13 23:16:00

One of the reasons that David Cummings built Atlanta Tech Village was to upend the Atlanta real estate world by providing solutions that fit the needs of startups. But startups need more than real estate. We need insurance, marketing services, accounting, and coaching. Many of those have solutions but some key ones don't.

One that doesn't have a good solution is computing hardware. Cloud services has created a wonderful solution for datacenter hardware and centralized services such as fileservers and telephone systems. But one area that doesn't seem to have a good solution is desktop hardware. You can finance it but you are still making payments on an asset that your stuck with for the term of the lease. If your team is fluctuating in size (interns, contractors, etc) then even a 1 year lease can be an issue.

What we need is some way of renting a workstation on a monthly basis. One solution is rent a Mac. They host an dedicated Mac Mini equivalent that you then VNC to from your laptop or other device. For employees willing to use their own laptops it is a solution to give them something more powerful. Their basic rental service has two tiers: $25 with a 1 terabyte/month limit and an unlimited bandwidth plan for $45. Its part of the solution but there still needs to be something in between two year leases and trade show rates.

04/30/13 23:41:00

I live in Kennesaw, Georgia and within walking distance of Kennesaw Mountain, site of the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. We have earthworks built by both Confederate and Union soldiers in our subdivision. So I sort of consider the mountain part of my backyard. So last week I filmed this as I was walking around my 'backyard':

04/28/13 21:29:00

David Cummings' last two posts discuss optimal size and time frame. Part of my job as the guy running Pipefish is to do my best to organize and direct it with the resources I have.

Pipefish began in ernest October of last year. We have spent the last six months testing some of our hypothesis and validating user expectations with our Facebook MVP. We know have two developers plus myself. One is our Lead Designer and the other is Lead Developer. My technical job is building the analytic side of the business. We are very close to the MVP for that side of the business.

This summer we are augmenting our startup staff with interns. If we hit our milestones then we are well on our way to “humming”. But there are a lot of ifs on that road. A lot of sales calls and a lot of user tests. Wish us luck!

04/27/13 23:51:00

This is a map of my 997 contacts on LinkedIn:

Poking around inside it I made a few observations:

1) The space community is very tightly self-connected

2) Myself, Stephen Fleming, Colin Ake, and Sean Mahoney are the only major connections between Atlanta and the new space industry. Yes, that is kind of obvious but its interesting to see it reflected so visually

3) There is little to no overlap between the people I've worked with at Georgia Tech and the people I met while I was working on my MBA.

4) There are two very interesting groups in the area between the Atlanta biz community and my former VeriSign and IETF colleagues. A few are COX and CAS Group people but also embedded in there are people who are just connectors in general. People with connections from all over.

04/26/13 23:16:00

I've been using D3.js for a few things lately and, as with many things, with great expressive power comes a higher cost for doing the 'easy' things. The responses to D3 at a lunch and learn this week as part of Big Data Week was a good example of how raw D3 can be intimidating.

Enter nvd3. nvd3 is a framework for a standard charts with D3. It standardizes many D3 options so the developer can focus on more important things. That does limit the types of graphs to line, bar, scatter/bubble, and pie charts. It includes two oddballs: a 'bullet' chart and expandable trees. If your project fits in those limitations then try nvd3. It could save valuable prototyping time.

04/24/13 22:59:00

This week has been Big Data Week in Atlanta and privacy and data governance come up from time to time. At tonights meeting it came up again so I posed this question:

Applying machine learning algorithms to our decisions will give us significant new capabilities. But to do that the systems need the data. Will those who choose to opt-out because of privacy concerns be at a disadvantage similar to the disadvantage the unaugmented may have cognitively and physically?

I absolutely respect anyone's right to opt-out. But what will be the cost? Will the lives of the digitally and physically augmented be so different from the unaugmented and private that, not only will they not be able to communicate, there won't be anything worth communicating about?